For those unsure of the impact foreign investment can have on UK
manufacturing, the story of Sunderland Airport is an enlightening tale.

In 1984 the cherished former RAF airbase was shut as a loss-making airport. At the time, the UK economy was struggling to recover from recession and unemployment hit record levels of 3.3m as shipyards and coalmines in the North East also shut.

However, the closure of the airfield would lead to a revitalisation of the local economy and the entire automotive industry in the UK.

The airfield had been identified by Japanese car maker Nissan as the site for its first European car plant and a deal was agreed with Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, who had made the area an enterprise zone.

In August 1986, the new plant produced its first car.

Today, exactly 25 years on, Nissan's Sunderland factory is the biggest in the UK.

It has produced more than 6m cars since it opened and employs more than 5,000 people. But the long journey from airfield to car plant has also helped to revolutionise working practises in the UK and the image of the industry abroad.

Sir Ian Gibson, now chairman of Trinity Mirror and supermarket chain Morrisons, was appointed by Nissan to set up the car maker's business in Britain.

"At our first meeting at the start of January 1985 we all sat round one table in a portacabin. That was the company," he explains. "We created the culture. There were 12 of us.

"We said there is no point doing this - taking the gamble of joining the company - other than to set out to be the best. That's how we spent the time looking at it."

Nissan had chosen the UK as a European base because it was the biggest sales market on the continent and also provided the accessibility of the English language.

However there was little successful volume manufacturing in the country. At the time, the UK car industry was in the doldrums following the collapse of British Leyland.

According to Sir Ian, who had worked for Ford across Europe, plants in the UK had the "worst productivity, the worst strike record, worst quality and the highest cost".

However, he and his bosses in Japan believed there was no reason why this had to remain the case.

With a blank piece of paper to build from, Sir Ian and his team learned from their experiences in the European industry and Japan. They believed training and leadership, not high-tech equipment, would be the key to the long-term success of the plant

Sir Ian set about hiring from the local area – stretching from Newcastle to Durham – with many workers arriving from the shipbuilding and mining industries.

"We were looking for people who could demonstrate some degree of mechanical skills and basically had the ability to learn, because we would be teaching them the automotive industry from scratch," he adds.

The workers were sent to work in Nissan's Oppama plant in Japan, where they learned the techniques and procedures that had helped make Asian car makers the most efficient in the world.

From Japan, they brought back theories such as Taizen – continuous improvement –and working with lower stock levels through "just-in-time" production.

"The biggest challenge was always how fast we could hire people and train them properly," he says. "You can hire people pretty quickly but our overall training programme for a shop floor worker took well over a year. Training people takes resource. If you want to get an extra 1,000 people to double the size of the business, you first of all need to find yourself, and train, up to 100 trainers."

As the new techniques were implemented across the Sunderland plant, they also began to flow to British suppliers too.

"It was like ripples in a pond," Sir Ian says. "We had an enormous influence over the suppliers we initially contracted in the UK and Europe. They had to reach quality standards which they weren't necessarily used to and gained exposure to our own productivity. Those suppliers then got other customers, like Jaguar, to which they applied the same techniques as Nissan."

Sir Ian believes phrases like "continuous improvement", "just-in-time production" and "inventory management" have now become the norm in the UK. Certainly, plants in this country have become regarded as the most efficient in Europe, consistently securing new production mandates, with the Japanese companies also driving through more flexible working practises and improved employee relations.

"Although the UK can be a strange place – in the sense that it is beleaguered with a lot of history when it comes to manufacturing – on the other hand it can be pretty open to change. It proved itself to be so through the 1980s and early 1990s."

Nissan's success in the UK led to Toyota and Honda opening plants in the country. The Japanese plants now account for more than half of all car production in the UK and are also leading the way in next-generation automotive technology. Nissan is spending £400m so Sunderland can build its Leaf electric car and develop a new battery plant, while Toyota's plant in Derbyshire is producing the Auris hybrid.

Tony Walker, the Toyota UK's deputy managing director for manufacturing and the company's fourth UK employee, says: "A customer recently asked me whether their car was a 'Friday car'. There hasn't been a 'Friday car' for 15 or 20 years. People have not recognised how far British car manufacturing has come."

Nor could they have recognised how much impact the closure of Sunderland Airport would have.